New Art Car NSX Body

Just finished up this HPI NSX 190mm body. This continues my experimentation with texture on an R/C car body. I used the principals and styles that I've been dealing with in my visual design fundamentals class. The orange is strategically placed to give emphasis to the shape on the roof. I also tried to use contrasting textures to separate the elements of the design. The sharpness of the shape on the roof causes it to stand out from the other 3 triangular shapes coming from the sides of the body.

First shot with some dramatic lighting. I'm not actually finished applying all the decals to the body yet. I'm not really to sure if I should. If they don't look good I can always peel them off easily. I put the first decal on the hood before these pics and it looks pretty good, so we'll see how the rest of them look on the car.

New bodies

Hpi S2000

WCICS Edmonton

The first round of the Western Canadian Indoor Championship Series was held in Edmonton the first weekend of November. It was my first carpet race and holy crap, wow, it was some pretty tough racing! 50 cars in touring stock and about 35 cars in super stock. Pretty good turnout. I managed to finish 16th and 14th in each class. Not up to my normal offroad racing standards! Disappointing, but I've got an excuse, I'm a carpet n00b. The next round I'll be going to is in March, which gives me a decent amount of time to practice. Hopefully those few months will give me some time to speed up and make the A for next time.

I did get some pictures.

*Edit- The formatting on this site is insane. It won't let me set this post up the way I want. So, this is a bit messed up.

Drivers meeting. A very different feel from a RC Pro drivers meeting.

Judging concourse

Close up of my body that was literally finger painted. Going to try this style again with a couple more bodies. I like the texture, but there isn't enough differentiation between the colour and textures.

Mandie's HPI Supra on a TC3

A Tamiya car. Wicked paint. Placed in the top 3 in concourse.

Some of the carnage from the World GT A-main. That's Buddha in the Green "Aston" making it cleanly through on the inside. He started in 2nd and in the ensuing insanity of the first lap ended up dead last after getting stuck on the boards for a good 8 seconds. He managed to make it up to 4th (I think) by the end of the race.

Some more World GT. These cars are tough to shoot. Especially because of the low light indoors. I was shooting with a ƒ2.0 and ISO800-1600 and it was impossible to get the shutter speed below 1/100th sec, which made getting a clear action shot of a car very difficult.

Gary Fleigal's WGT car sporting his signature paint scheme. Nice looking car. He had a tough time with traffic in the main. Looked like there was some traction rolling going on too.

Buddha screwin' it up in a quali, lol. :-p

Lots of guys running the RC10R5.

One last shot of the craziness from the WGT class.

My T2'007. Brushed. Yeah, that's right, not a brushless motor OMG! 

Korgae Scales with his brand new T3. Fast. The guy can wheel. All I can do is hope to stay on the same lap as him by the end of this season.

Buddha hitting the tire machine. Crazy foam tire people.

Pretty busy pit area. Not huge like the late great Winter Nats, but quite a few guys.

KETCHUP!!!!!

The "other RD" Circa! You could hear her tiny barks through the RD's sound system randomly, lol.

Lightpainting model cars

After taking the trophy pictures I decided to try something that I had a go at about a year ago with my old point and shoot camera. This time things were a bit easier, being that this camera is an SLR and I've got a tripod now, no more soap box on the floor tripods!

25", ƒ5.0, ISO400, 50mm

Missed the focus on this one a bit, but it still looks good below 800x600 resolution. This is a 1/24th scale McLaren F1 GTR model sitting on top of a 1/10th scale touring car body, so that I wouldn't get light from the floor in the frame. I only cropped this picture.

30", ƒ5.0, ISO400, 50mm

This is a 1/10th Tamiya 2001 Impreza WRC body. I used the phone on this one again. I had to add the tires in with photoshop and I also used the clone stamp tool in PS to get rid of the mounting holes in the rear window. The focus on this shot came out a lot better.

Lightpainting the trophy collection

Every once and a while I get bored and decide to bust out the camera and try something new to kill some time. Or, in this case, at least to try and refine something I haven't tried in a long time. So, what started off as a bit of a document of my trophy collection turned into a little quest to make a line up of trophies on an ugly carpet floor in my room interesting. Editing the first shot, with it's diffused even lighting and HDR effect, wasn't enough to make it interesting.

The first shot, edited. Pretty boring, but it does cover everything, so it has accomplished it's task of documentation, although, actually, I forgot a couple trophies in garage.

A little while later when I was thinking about the fact that this picture is an HDR, and yet has no real interesting contrast I realized that the reason for this was that the lighting was too flat. I had turned on every light in my room and get a well lit picture, and it is well lit, but the light is quite flat. So, I figured I needed to add some dramatic lighting. Meaning using one single light source that hasn't been reflected off of anything. The closest thing was a battery discharger I used to use. It's comprised of about 12 automotive light bulbs and runs off a R/C battery pack.

Kind of a strange light source, but it introduced some interest into the pictures.

Things were going better at this point, but I wanted something a bit more dramatic, something that would catch the edges of these trophies and really accentuate their lines. Well, I thought, light painting is dramatic as hell, but I'm not sure if the light streaks will take away from the trophies. I started by using a lighter, and after the third 30 second exposure I was starting to burn the hell out of my thumb! The metal on the ends of those BIC lighters get awfully hot when you hold them horizontal for that long!

Here is the first attempt. I went up and down the rows with the lighter. At this point I hadn't blocked off my window or closed my laptop, so there is quite a bit of light in the background. The room was really dark, but not dark enough to provide the kind of contrast I needed.

So, I blocked off my window and closed my Macbook up. The results were much better. More contrast, and I had more control with the lighting.

30", ƒ10.0, ISO100, 50mm

I desaturated this one a bit. I also isolated the highlights and cut them to new layer in photoshop. Then I took the shadows down darker using the levels adjustment in PS. The line of the lighter in this one went a bit wild, I was hoping to give a flow left to right and front to back, but the trail of the flame doesn't come out that smooth, because the flame flickers about when you move the lighter.

Rows again. This was the best of the lighter only shots.

Oh, Yeah, click on the pics for full resolution! Much better!

30", ƒ10.0, ISO100, 50mm again

I did the same editing with this photo as well. The edit isn't severe, but I just wanted to make the contrast a bit stronger, and of course just twisting the contrast knob wildly isn't going to do that properly, so there was a more layers utilized in this one too.

Well, by this point my thumb can't take anymore, I'm dropping the lighter and howling in pain, in the pitch black some madman. That's when I pulled out the cell phone to bring some light in with absolutely no pain at all. The light from the phone is much less intense though, so I increased the ISO on my camera to 400 and opened up the aperture a bit.

30", ƒ5.6, ISO400, 50mm

The streaks come across like some kind of celestial gas formation, or the tail of Haley's comet. I love the sense of motion they create, and the colour is beautiful. It's possible to vary the intensity of the colour in each streak by changing the speed at which you move the light source. I also hovered the light under the peak of each trophy to add some more light to each trophy. The depth of field is a bit shallower in this one too, which is unfortunate, but without the aperture being wider there wouldn't be much colour/light at all, even with a 30" exposure. The only editing I did to this shot was to change the white balance a bit afterwards. It was a bit to warm.

Another shot.

30", ƒ5.6, ISO400, 50mm

Less streaking here, but with a bit stronger colours, because I went a bit slower. The lower volume of streaks gives some of the focus back to the trophies. You can see a bit of a yellowish light in lower right corner here. I put a little flash from the lighter in at around the 10 second mark. I did try using the two lights together, but the results were a bit strange. The light from the lighter just over powered the cell phone.

Well, that's enough for right now. I did a bit more light painting with car models after this. I'll post that up soon.

Introduction

As my first entry, to my first blog, I'd like to provide a bit of an introduction. I'm Brad Comis, uhm,
Hi. A/S/L? 22/M/Grande Prairie, Alberta, Canada, aka the great white north, and it really is the great white north here. Snow for about 6 months of the year.
Anyway, I started in photography about a year ago and purchased my first DSLR in december 2008. I blast most of my money into my R/C cars, so I don't spend a ton on equipment, but thats where post production comes into play.
R/C racing has been an obsession of mine for the last 9 years. In 2004 me and my father started the first real R/C club in town, which has grown into a successful racing organization with over 80 members (www.gpmra.net). I've travelled all over Alberta and BC for races. Won the CORCS nationals in 1/10th 2wd electric truck in 2007 and 2008, plus at the 2007 Winter Nats. That isn't the hardest racing class though, but does sound good. My best nitro result would be 4th place at the RC Canadian Nats a few months ago in 1/8th buggy, or maybe 2nd place at the 2009 Canadian winter Nats in the Truggy class. I've also worked at a hobby shop for the last 5 years, and have painted well over 100 bodies, most of which were for local racers.

That's me at an autocross last year with "mah suby." So, it's all about the cars.